Chords of Imagination

It's an editor's job to help the author stay within the perspective they've chosen. Usually, that's a limited 3rd person or 1st person (which is inherently limited to one character's POV). But I think some copyeditors get overzealous; they're trying so hard to keep the POV character within their own 5 senses that they won't let them think or observe.

As a concrete example of what I mean, I'm going to quote from a first-person scene (part of an essay, "Fighting" by Bee Lavender, published in Without A Net):

I had put my baby into the back of the car, buckled the car seat, and was about to get in when I sensed danger. I turned around and a man had materialized, not near the car, but actually standing within the curve of the door. He reached out with both arms and I pulled back my fist and he saw, through the scrim of light from the car, the expression on my face. He pulled his hands back, held them in front of his face, jumped back a foot, stumbled, and apologized before running away into the darkness.

It helps that Lavender is writing nonfiction about her own experience, and so it's virtually impossible for her to "head hop" into someone else's POV. She's only telling us what she knows. That bolded part, though it describes what the attacker sees, is still within her POV: it's something she observes, concludes, puts together. If I may coin an incredibly awkward verb, she Sherlock-Holmeses it.

Some copyeditors would mark this as incorrect. They'd insist that for accuracy, the sentence needs to run "I guess he saw" or "he must have seen" or some other such apologetic I'm-just-spitballing-here phrasing. But the woman scaring off a carjacker is not apologetic! It'd be more of a disservice to her POV to hem and haw and clog this prose up with unneeded filter words.

Now, I think some of it is a matter of confidence. A copyeditor who isn't sure of a writer's skill level or intentions may be stricter about POV in an attempt to be supportive (better to flag a possible error than let the writer risk it, they figure). But when the writer knows what they're doing, and figures the reader will know what they're doing, it's annoying to be over-corrected in a way that, while claiming to keep POV accurate, just makes it less vivid or insightful.

As a writer and a reader, I like it when the POV character makes observations about other characters' feelings, and I try to bring this benefit of the doubt into my copyediting, too.

Bren: “ugh I’m failing as Paidhi, how can I express my complex human emotions to the Atevi around me?”

the actual message of Tragic Villains is (almost) always “people who are never taught or given any healthy, constructive outlets for their emotions will often find unhealthy, destructive outlets.” it’s that people who are traumatized and never learn how to cope with that trauma can become a danger to themselves and others. the message isn’t “trauma makes you evil!!!!” or “genocide is okay if you’ve been sad before!!!!” it’s “people need compassion and help to recover from trauma instead of becoming increasingly angry and harming themselves and others in the process.”

this site takes an alarmingly behaviorist and punitive approach to everything and it’s literally the most annoying thing. y’all have this concept that “if we just punish people hard enough, if we just scare them enough, if we just make them feel guilty enough.” that people just Do Bad Things Because They Do Bad Things, I Guess, and Because We Didn’t Threaten Them And Shame Them Enough. but humans are an innately social species. at our very core, we need compassion and kindness. we need healthy relationships with other humans.

Ilisidi:

"What if a small group of religious extremists, persecuted in their own country, moved to an inhospitable uninhabited island and had to rebuild society there?" - But the Americas and Australia weren't inhospitable and were full of Native nations, why are you perpetuating the idea of Terra Nullius and manifest destiny? - Yes, that's because this isn't a metaphor for the British invading other countries, it's a metaphor for finding out how much of a person's religious practise is rooted in worldly concerns, vs how much they will really stymie themselves for the sake of God.

"What if 1/100 children born was a werewolf?" - But queer people are no danger to straight people, and disabled people don't have predictable patterns to their illnesses, and most people who have uncontrollable rages really CAN control them and are just lying, and no minority group has superpowers... - Yes, but that's all immaterial, because I wanted to talk about a load of other metaphors about the passage of time and responsibility and the relationship between humans and wildlife.

I think it particularly comes up the moment an author includes any sort of marginalisation/oppression for their fictional/fantasy world. I've lost count of the times now where I've seen people read a book on, say, the terrible oppression of the Gwyllion, and immediately gone "Oh, so the Gwyllion are a metaphor for the real world X people, either deliberately or accidentally through the author's inherent racism. This is therefore super problematic because the Gwyllion are also described as Y, which means the author is also saying that about X people."

There will always be real world parallels when discussing oppression. Always. But that's because oppression is oppression - precise details may vary, but it follows the same pathways the world over, and that will naturally be copied into fiction as well. This does not mean the author is intentionally telling the exact allegory that you've projected onto it. If that's how you read everything, then yeah, everything becomes super problematic, but also, why are you reading any fiction that isn't solely about real world historical events? It's clearly not for you

And, you know, obviously there are works that are racist/misogynistic/etc, including deliberately so. But I really don't like the way people have started going "I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY here, I'm ever so smart" and acting like they're the cleverest little critic that ever lived. You have to meet a work on its own terms. Lovecraft was a big ole racist, sure. Someone who has written a book about the oppression of magic users in their fantasy world, however, is rarely writing a story about how queerness lurks in family lines and must be controlled; they are way more commonly writing a story about a world with magic that they then wanted to take seriously, and while there might well be elements of queerness there, those magic users are not a 1:1 replacement.

Sometimes these lines are blurry! But we're going way too far to one end of that spectrum

The post that got me thinking about this yesterday was someone talking about how they'd love to write a vampire story exploring vampirism as a disability (dependence on a substance to manage the condition, blindness/weakness in daytime, can't enter buildings without accommodation, etc). But, they said, they can't, because they don't want to be making the point that disabled people are parasites, and vampires are generally considered parasitic.

And like. What an incredible shame. That we'll lose that, because they're already afraid of the "I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY" crowd. That would be a great story for exploring disability themes, OR just a great new take on vampires, and either of those things would be so good to read. But there would be so many people who would jump in with "So you think disabled people are draining the life force of the ableds around them?", never stopping to actually think "Vampires are not a 1:1 stand in for real world disability because they are fictional and do not exist."

BookBrowse is a great resource that includes readalikes, new releases, and the option to filter fiction and nonfiction by genre, subgenres, time period, setting, page count, debut books, and small presses.

BookPage publishes small monthly magazines that can be found in many libraries and bookstores, but all of their lists, author interviews, and reviews can also be found on their website. each month spotlights new releases across a variety of genres and age groups.

Electric Literature publishes short stories, poems, novel excerpts, interviews with authors, and even the occasional book list

the Indie Next List compiles a monthly list of titles recommended by independent booksellers across the US, with an archive of lists

Lit Hub publishes lots of great pieces and literary news, in addition to book lists

over at Paste we've got, you guessed it, reviews, recommendations, and author interviews

like sci-fi, fantasy, and horror? check out Reactor Mag! among other things, they have monthly compilations of all the genre fiction coming out

and for my podcast heads check out The Stacks, where host Traci Thomas is dropping weekly interviews with authors about their new books and the podcasts' monthly book club reads